Rome grew from a small band of villages in central Italy to the greatest empire of its time. Roman law and sciences spread throughout the Western World, changing forever the ways of the Europeans and North Africans. Romans built coloniae (colonies) on their western frontier by very strict standards, making certain that the people who lived there knew they were a part of the Empire. The ruins of Roman forts and bath houses can be found in England, at the edges of Roman rule, and the parts of the great Roman roads can still be seen today.

In 1800, the land held by the new United States was small compared to what was called Louisiana. Louisiana was named for King Louis XIV. It was part of a large claimed area in the New World called New France. It stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains.

When winter skies turn gray, and the air thickens with chill, life becomes harder for the feathered ones. Food is scarcer, and handouts from us humans can make a difference to them. Take just a few minutes to create a place for the birds to hang out on a frosty day. Once you've got your feeder hung, check out a bird identification book from the library to learn the names of your grateful guests.

Brimming with the fruits of the harvest, the cornucopia has become an important symbol of American Thanksgiving. Its origins go further back in time to the ancient Greeks. According to their myths, young Zeus gave his foster mother Amalthaea a goat's horn that could be filled with whatever she wished.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker jumped off the train in Manifest, Kansas, well before it officially stopped—and for good reason. Abeline was in a bit of a mood. She, who was used to criss-crossing the whole nation alongside of her beloved drifter dad Gideon, was being parked for an entire summer at the dustiest, driest town imaginable while he goes to work a railroad job in another state. In Moon Over Manifest, by Clare Vanderpoole, the year is 1938—about 20 summers since her Dad was here as a boy. The whole town, not just the lawns and the gardens, seems like it’s about to blow away in the June wind. What Abilene doesn’t realize is that this seemingly dead place is full of secrets and regrets just waiting to bubble to the surface.

Faith Ringgold is an artist who uses different materials to tell the stories that are important to her family and her people. Whether working with quilting squares, African masks, paint and brush, or her own words, Faith gives the rich colors and textures a life of their own. There's motion in her work, a striving upward and pushing at the edges of her world.

“My name is Blaise Fortune, and I am a citizen of the French Republic. It’s the pure and simple truth.”

Koumail knows this phrase in French very well. It is vitally important that he remember it for he and Gloria, the woman who has looked after him since he was a baby, are refugees, and someday this phrase and an old passport may be his ticket to a better life away from war, starvation and danger. A Time of Miracles, by Anne-Laure Bondoux, is set in the 1990s, as war rages in the Caucasus region, and the Soviet Union has collapsed, leaving masses of people without shelter or food.

Storms batter the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Always have. Always will. Ships break up in those dangerous seas. Sometimes there are survivors but oftentimes not. It’s 1898, and waiting and watching are the surfmen—the rescuers of the Lifesaving Service—who take out boats in horrible weather and try to save whom they can. In Teetoncey, by Theodore Taylor, twelve-year-old Ben O’Neal is determined to become a surfman, leaving his mother’s storm-swaying house on a terrible night to go help at the Rescue Station. He’s seen the flare, and he knows—there’s a ship in trouble.

Promising young archaeologist Verity Grey ventured to the wilds of Scotland for a job interview little knowing that she was leaving behind her secure London flat for encounters with ghostly visions and the threat of madness in Susanna Kearsley’s Shadowy Horses.